Survey Roundup: Home Is Where the Loan Fraud Is

A look at some recent surveys and reports dealing with risk and compliance issues. Send surveys and reports to wsjrisk at wsj com. And please vote in our poll of the top compliance issues of 2014.

Fraud Sweet Fraud: Seventy-four percent of loans reported in 2013 involved some kind of fraud or misrepresentation on the loan application, up from 69% in 2012, according to the annual mortgage fraud report by LexisNexis. Florida remained the top state with the most cases of mortgage fraud, followed by Nevada and New Jersey.

Strict credit conditions and requirements are making it hard for home buyers to qualify for loans, with 15% of real estate agents saying they’ve had customers that failed to close a pending sale due to the inability to qualify for financing. “It is not difficult to recognize the connection between tight credit approval guidelines, industry professionals looking to make a profit and mortgage application fraud, the most common type of reported mortgage fraud by far in 2013,” the report said.

Sharing is Not Caring: A survey by identity and access management provider SailPoint finds companies have good reason to be worried about the security of their information in the cloud, as 20% of respondents admitted uploading proprietary corporate data to a cloud application with the specific intent of sharing it outside of the company.

I Really Don’t Know Clouds At All: A report by PwC looks at what internal audit departments can do to keep up with the rapid pace of cloud adoption, offering best practices for companies trying to keep pace with the rapid change occurring in cloud technologies.

How Sure Secure?: A survey of 2,011 consumers from the U.S. and U.K. by data security firm Tripwire Inc. found 52% of U.S. consumers and 43% of U.K. consumers believe using a third-party payer such as PayPal or Google Wallet is the safest way to pay for goods online.

Dirty Money: A report by research organization Global Financial Integrity found $991.2 billion was lost to illicit financial flows in 2012, with $6.6 trillion in illicit capital funneled out of developing markets between 2003 and 2012.

Room to BYOD: A survey of IT managers and business executives by U.K.-based cloud communications company Ring Central found 51% of companies asked don’t have a BYOD policy, while 45% do.

A probe into large-scale mortgage fraud widened yesterday, with charges laid alleging bank staff were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks to approve dozens of fraudulent property loans.

The charges allege that payments, ranging from $5000 to more than $30,000, were paid by and to bank staff in return for approving suspect mortgage applications.The Serious Fraud Office said total kickbacks paid exceeded $500,000 , with one accused lawyer alleged to have paid a bank staff member $253,303 over an eight-month period.